The pioneer of the Battle Pass could now do without it completely in the future. Valve has declared that a new chapter is beginning in the further development of Dota 2.
Valve rarely directly comments on the development process of their games, but in a (blog post from June 19) they have now announced the decision that Dota 2 will work without Battle Pass in the future.
A stark move for the MOBA, which was previously considered a pioneer of Battle Pass.
More content instead of Battle Pass
In almost ten years of development since release, Dota 2 has already been through a lot. Setting the tone, however, was the success of the first compendium for The International 2013.
The positive feedback from players ensured that it eventually evolved into the Battle Pass, which has since encouraged players to grind year after year around the Dota 2 World Championship.
From Valve’s perspective, however, the huge focus on the annual Battle Pass had the undesirable consequence that many features or ideas for the game were eventually incorporated into the Battle Pass instead of being introduced separately for the game. This resulted in the rest of the year being relatively poor in terms of updates.
To remedy this problem, the developers experimented since the beginning of the year with diverting resources away from Battle Pass development and putting them into other projects instead. Thus, only the latest extensive patch 7.33 was implemented, which changed the entire map and added numerous new elements to the game.
Due to the positive feedback from the community, Valve has now decided to abandon the idea of the Battle Pass.
ICYMI: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future. https://t.co/3NmxHvMpft Dota2 pic.twitter.com/FdKePvCTuK
– Wykrhm Reddy (@wykrhm) June 20, 2023
A future without Battle Pass
Without the Battle Pass, the blog post says the development team can focus on producing content for everyone – especially those players who can’t or don’t want to invest money.
Despite the removal of the Battle Pass, there will still be opportunities for the community to increase the prize pool of The International 2023. The redirected focus is intended to make Dota 2 less reliant on chasing record amounts in the long run and keep players engaged with the game via more and more frequent content.
The reactions of the community range from expectant to sceptical. The many cosmetics and playable content of the previous Battle Passes are well remembered and have always provided an incentive to play more Dota 2 around TI.
If these are now removed, some voices fear that Dota 2 will now only run in “maintenance” mode and end up like the Team Fortress 2 community, which has been waiting for updates for years.
Others, however, are hopeful about the new direction, as the strict focus on the Battle Pass has overshadowed Dota 2 for quite some time.
Whether Valve can keep the promise of more content remains to be seen. In any case, it’s more than newsworthy that the one-time pioneer of the Battle Pass is now bucking the trend across the gaming industry.
